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| This is a great place for a covert meeting, and is very relaxing to boot |
The meeting Me, Freddie and Neon set up with the SK security boss went
well. She chose a nice cafe with real coffee that was by Central park, which
added a charming old-world atmosphere to our discussions of espionage, intrigue
and attempts to deliberately induce a large-scale pandemic. We explained what
we had found and then arranged to safely hand over the CFD tablets that Teh
Dave had been using. She said she'd have them analyzed to find out more about
them and, hopefully, where they came from. We also explained his supply chain
and how it went back to a man we thought was with Renraku. She offered to
investigate further.
As we were wrapping up there, Dayglo told us that she had a job and
arranged a meeting. Her contact was from Renraku (Funny that) and wanted to
meet us in the middle of Central Park. (How very Cold War!) She was rather open
with us about what she was after, given that this was a job of opportunity and
was definitely on a limited timetable. What had happened was that Doctor
Abigail Hughes, a researcher at Mindstorm Neurotechnologies had vanished, and
she wanted to find out where they were and, if possible extract them.
In other words, somebody at the same company that we had just foiled an
attack on. Funny that.
Background research told us a lot more about the hows and whys of this particular
operation ad a few more clued as to what might be going on. The race to find a
cure for CFD is incredibly intense; every one of the Big Ten want to be the ones
to do it and, in such, reap billions form somebody else's screw-up. Renraku has
been doing particularly badly in this field, possibly because of their own
fears of anything to do with Artificial Intelligence. On the other hand,
NeoNET, through their Mindstorms Neurotech subsidiary, were making so big
strides. Which is useful for them, all things considered. And by that I mean
Boston.
 |
| Sample Generic Wageslave |
The first step of our investigation was her home, an anonymous corp
owned apartment building in Southside, not too far from where we were mucking about
with the Axemen (But fortunately free of Gargoyles). Initial external Fly-Spy
recon of the place suggested she was not at home, so we moved it up to boots on
the ground. Dayglo used a physical mask
spell to disguise me as a Generic Corp Drone (Yes, she actually cast a spell. I
was amazed) and so elementary B&E allowed me to get into the building and
then get to her apartment.
I would have started by rifling the place, but somebody already had
done a number on it. Interestingly enough, however, their search had been both
frantic and focused; digging through specific places clearly looking for
specific things. We figured it was Doc Hughes herself, looking for something in
a hurry before she got the hell out of there. While there was no physical
evidence of where she was, I was able to get Neon into her computer to do some sifting
around, most of it was mundane, but her last activity was to plot a route from
where she was to the Pit, going via the underground, and then download it to
her commlink. And she'd dome that just over an hour sago.
On other words, she was in the wind, headed for the worst part of town
and doing such via the moist dangerous method she could think of. Every last
part of that smacked of desperation.
With me back to my normal beautiful self, we followed her trail to a
nearby sewer entrance. Me, Freddie (on foot, amazingly enough) and Dayglo went
in while Neon was riding backup from the Van. She almost immediately net full
brat on us, commenting about how she was in the nice, warm and clean van while
we were stomping around knee-deep in crap in the sewers. I mean, yeah, it was a
hateful experience, but she didn't need to be a complete jerk about it.
Freddie's Fly-Spies found traces of her, but also told us that she’d
made a super-stupid mistake. In her effort to shave some time off her trip,
she'd decided to take a shortcut through a service pipe that was a lot darker,
danker and almost certainly full of Devil Rats. Yeah, brilliant move. You'll be
enjoying the time you saved when the little buggers are chewing on your bones,
dumbarse. Sadly, this meant that we needed to follow her in order to get her
back alive.
We managed to get sight on her up ahead. Unfortunately, as we did, we
were also attacked by a swarm of about a zillion or so Devil Rats gushing out
from pipes, dropping from the roof, boiling up from the muck and whatever the
hell else. Told you! I was dancing through the little bleeders as they dropped
down on me, while Freddie had several gnawing on his jacket. They hadn’t gotten
through it yet, but they were definitely doing a number on it.
Amazingly enough, Dayglo managed to actually be useful for once. She
used a light spell to illuminate the area, not only giving us a better bead on
the Devil Rats but also weakening them (The wretched little pests are very
sensitive to light), and then threw up a barrier spell to help protect us from
them. I used the grenade launcher on my Alpha to break up clumps of them, while
Freddie blazed away with his AK.
 |
| Only thing worse then a Devil Rat is a massive, magically active Devil Rat |
Through all the mess I spotted a single Devil Rat that was bigger and
nastier then the lot; a fragging Demon Rat. (Fun fact: There are five known varieties
of them. They are all awful). I immediately wasted the little fragger with a
burst from my rifle, reducing it to chunks of rat salsa. It seemed to have been
controlling the others as they immediately broke and fled. Yay.
We caught up with Doc Hughes and tried to figure out what was going on,
especially given that she had one arm in a sling and was doing her best to hold
it over her head at all times. Her explanation only served to make things more
awkward. The attack on Mindstorms we’d foiled was in fact the second one that
day. The first had actually made it inside the building before going pear-shaped
and had resulted in a lot of explosions. She’d been collateral damage to one
after a fact, and had been hit by a chunk of debris that was crawling with CFD
nanites, hence the elevated arm in a sling
Her plan (such as it was) involved fleeing the company and making her
way to a former colleague of hers, being Doctor Sleep. It was an outside shot
but she was desperate and figured that, at the very least, he'd be willing to
try and treat her because he was immune to CFD infection. We agreed to help her
if only to get some more info about what was going on with her and this other
attack on the company.
Doctor Sleep's lab was surrounded by Ghouls who were apparently there for
the cast-offs. Lovely. The doctor himself was... Yeah. Look, he’s a Ghoul, he's
as creepy as all get out. He had a few radical plans to slow the infection, but
it wasn't much. What we did find out, however, was that the sample that
infected the Doctor was one of Teh Dave's batch of lovelies, which only served
to make things even worse, given that they had a massively accelerated
infection rate.
Of course, I was filthy, stinky, covered in crap and everything else by
the time we got back to the van. Neon was teasing me about it. So I gave her a
huge hug. Then I went back to the penthouse to wash forever and have a swim. Or
two.
We wanted to find out more about what had happened, so we went back to
Mindstorms and got into their system.
There was some surveillance footage of the first attack, which allowed us to
take a look at those involved. Dayglo was able to identify three of them;
Psychotic Peanut (Gnome Infiltrator), Colonel Bob (Human with a thick
moustache) and Sergeant Zero (Muscular Elf). None of them were on our ‘missing’
list, but the good news was that Dayglo knew where they hung out. Sadly, this
was a dive bar in the Terminal District (I am so sick of that place).
The Dive Bar was, unsurprisingly, a dive. But the team in question were
in attendance; besides the three we’d seen so far, there were two others;
Wubber Ducky (Dwarf Decker) and Fat Man Blue (Very bright blue Oni). I took a
straightforward approach by simply coming up and fan-girling all over them,
which definitely got them talking. I said that I was a runner, and showed them the
highlight vid from the highway chase (and a few others). I also invited Freddie
over, which really earned a lot of good favour because of the combination of
his being a veteran like them while also having an epic moustache.
All of that was enough to get them talking about their operation. They had
been hired by the same chunky Japanese man that we’ve come to associate with this
mess in New York. What was meant to be an extraction got blown open and turned
into a gunfight, and they had to get out of there. From what we could tell, the
Renraku Johnson had then hired the CFDed trio to finish the job, only for them
to be intercepted by the three of us.
Doctor Sleep called us back to tell us that his attempts to stabilize Doc
Hughes had failed. Simply put, the CFD infection was moving a lot faster than
expected, and she wouldn’t last too long. We worked out a compromise to hand
her bloodied, torn and crap-soaked jacket back to the Renraku Johnson who had
hired us in the first place, claiming that she’d been dumb and been eaten by
Devil Rats, which wasn’t too far off the truth. She seemed to buy it, and we
got paid.
And then to top it all off, we got some info back from our friend at
SK. The first bit was that she was able to ID the Renraku Johnson that had
behind the attacks. His name was Gennouke Oshi, and he was a high-level ‘troubleshooter’
from the Japanese home office. Not good. And her second bit of news was even
worse; the “tablets” that Teh Dave had been handing out were laced with not
only CFD nanites, but they had been hybridized with some sort of advanced
replicator nanite. In other words, they were designed to speed up the infection
rate on purpose.
What the hell, Renraku?
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